Dawn of a Dark Knight (2 page)

The glowing entity released without warning.

Ashor fell on his ass. He scrambled like an uncovered crab away from the radiant being. Momentarily he glanced at his burning wrist to watch in repulsed fascination as the divots of digit impressions filled in black and coalesced into a tattoo of a black eye.

The Eye of Horus
. A sign of divine protection.

He squinted to see into the brilliant face of what was probably one of the original members of the Egyptian pantheon. One of the oldest gods in existence.

“Horus?”

“I have been called many names. That name to which you refer is pronounced
Hàru. Horus sounds crass.”

“Aren’t you guys only able to enter the Human Realm if we do one of those asinine—I mean, long summoning ceremonies?” Ashor used his hand to shield his eyes against the radiance.

“Some make rules to dictate their actions, like your handler, Ma’at. Now there is a goddess that loves to lay down new edicts. I do not care much for rules. The others do, though. And you have certainly broken one of those recently, have you not?” Shimmering gold eyes darted to the dead human.

“It’s not like that piece of shit is a loss to the world. If you’re here to punish, then get on with it. I’m not in the mood to kiss your ass like Ma’at requires we do.”
Kill me.

Horus chuckled. “We will simply reincarnate you, if I send you from this life. I find you far too entertaining to release from your mess right now. It also matters not to me if you kill Hashishins. Their death simply means you have created a new daemon to run around in the Middle Realm.”

“Why are you here?” Ashor caught Horus’s critical look.
Not good.
“Okay. What do you want me to do?”

“Retrieve the
akhrian
.”

“You tell me who and where our healer is and I’ll go get him.”

“You know exactly who the
akhrian
is. We gave you that information years ago. Waiting has weakened all of you and dwindled your number to eight. You are in danger of losing your healer. The Hashishins threaten this one. If they kill this
akhrian
, it will be a few decades before we can arrange another one to enter the Human Realm.”

Protective instinct surged. Ashor ground out, “She is not the
akhrian
.”

Horus sent him a condescending grin. “It is time for you to accept what is meant to be.” In a millisecond, the god disappeared.

Ashor sat blind in the abrupt darkness for a few seconds. He rotated his left wrist. His watch indicated he had less than an hour to make his meeting.

He fingered the still burning Eye of Horus
,
now a permanent resident on his forearm. That god had been real.

Gods did not do personal visitation. The honor he should feel was absent. He’d been doing this long enough to know the gods were not into altruism.

Was the sky-god’s visit only about the fact he hadn’t recruited the
akhrian
in a timely manner? Maybe she was in danger. His pulse picked up. Apprehension clamped his gut.

He had last laid eyes on her over a decade ago. She appeared out of nowhere to rescue his tortured carcass from an Order of Assassins prison on the eve of their
coup de grace
execution ceremony. Then she disappeared into obscurity. Yet he always knew where she was. With a little focus, he could find her essence. She clearly wanted nothing to do with them. For saving his ass, he’d heeded her wish to stay away, thinking her safe. But her protection was his priority.

He allowed himself to feel for her, something he’d classified as an off-limits activity years ago since it was addictive. Touching her essence was like snorting top-tier narcotics—pure, hard, and powerful.

Within a second he felt her spirit. His body jolted. She was close. An surge of exhilaration blasted through him a second before he tasted her fear. Then he felt
them
. Hashishins were near her, threatening her. Rage squeezed his chest.

He jumped up. More humans were going to die tonight.

As he rounded the corner of the mobile home his shitkickers skidded to a halt. “Son of a bitch,” he mumbled as the smidgen of hope the others didn’t know about his hunt-and-kill episodes died.

Javen waved a hand through the busted supercar’s windshield and whistled.

“I thought Ashor loved this car. He left her running in this neighborhood?” Nate asked while kneeling to view the car’s front bumper. “He had a frontal collision. Must’ve gone through the windshield.”

“I bet that sucked,” Javen replied in his crisp British accent. He twirled his favorite serrated dagger with an eerie smile. Three one-inch diagonal inked scars coursed from Javen’s forehead to chin. Another spanned the circumference of his neck, all the result of a nasty daemon strike decades ago. The relaxation in his massive frame indicated he’d given his knife a workout, something the cranky century-old Brit hadn’t been allowed since the others voted him off daemon-killing duty a few months ago.

The threat of Javen Turning, of the
kem-seki
taking over and changing him into an insane creature with no moral compass scared the shit out of the others. But not him. Several good magi had seen the lethal end of his blade when they Turned. Not a duty he took pride in. But this was the screwed-up way of things.

When they voted on Javen’s status Ashor had said
let-him-fight
, whereas the other six voted
no-way
. Democracy won. But none anticipated the outcome.

Javen spent most of his time when not in the gym drinking, shooting up, or smoking weed. Or everything at once. Drugs had but a dulling effect on them, which meant, on bad days when drugs and hard liquor weren’t enough to suppress Javen’s need to fight, he pounded a magus into oblivion. But not the Prime. None challenged him with that kind of bullshit.

Ashor sauntered to the car. Both magi head-swiveled with slack-jaw
oh-shits
. So, they hadn’t wanted to be caught tailing him.

“You guys just in the area?”

“Something like that,” Javen replied. “You look like blood-covered shite.”

“Busy night?” Ashor pointed at two SUVs parked a hundred feet up the dirt road. Blood decorated both cars like an exploded strawberry daiquiri. He estimated at least half a dozen dead bodies littered the lawn nearby. How did Javen manage to stay clean?

“You?” Javen parked his blade into the prime real estate upside down on the left-hand panel of his tactical vest.

Ashor scowled, but remained mute.

“Those Hashishin shits were trying to ambush you. You’re welcome, by the way.”

He expected the dark-magik bastards would get organized at some point. He’d been hunting them against his will for several months. But that didn’t mean it was right for others to violate the gods’ no-kill rule.

The heavy bass hip-hop song blasting from his car radio was interrupted by, “
It’s official. Sources claim the Jacksonville gas station explosion was a terrorist attack. So far, no group has publicly taken credit for the incident
.”

Javen whistled low and laughed hard.

Ashor mumbled, “What is the world coming to?”

“That better not be a tear coming out of your eye, Javen.” Nate plucked at an eyebrow ring, something his sergeant definitely wouldn’t have approved of in his old life as a Ranger. As a magus, the hardcore face metal worked, even if he was still stuck in newbie land.

“What?” Ashor glared at the two.

Javen laughed harder. He waved at Nate between snorts. “Meet the FBI’s most wanted felon. Nate, the gas station terrorist.” He wiped at his eyes.

Nate flashed a middle finger.

“What did you do?” Ashor demanded.

“They can’t pin it on me. Car’s untraceable. And it’s not like I stuck around for a mug shot.”

“This is almost as good as last month when you put Chicago O’Hare into blackout,” Javen said.

“My phone needed charging before we got on the plane. How was I to know the outlet would spark me and shut down the airport?”

Ashor pinned Nate with a glare that had him shifting on his feet. He barely held the surging
kem-seki
in check and knew his eyes probably swirled the blackest possible with its stain on his irises. “What happened?”

“Accidentally ignited my car while pumping gas.”

“Did anyone get hurt?”

“No.”

“Electrical fuckhead,” Javen grumbled low. “It’s been almost a decade since you got initiated. It’s time you found some control.”

“Go home. Both of you. I do not want to hear that they’re calling in the National Guard because there’s been another explosion. I’ve got to meet with Christian.”

And with her.

Chapter Two

“Who’s the girl?” the Asian asked, emerging from the shadows at the edge of the parking lot. With an antsy shrug, he adjusted the lapels of his upmarket suede jacket. His black eyes squinted toward the darkness just beyond the light cast by a nearby streetlight.

“Seems I’m not the only one who thought showing up stag was a bad idea.” Markus eyeballed the three muscled ogres hovering near the Asian.

“Who is she?”

“My authenticator.” Markus grinned as if he was about to down a
mai tai at a beach party.

Get serious, please,
thought Kira. This black-market art deal was about to get drenched
.

Markus glanced down to find his navy blue aloha shirt was buttoned one off toward the middle and took to fixing it. The shirt’s wrinkles suggested it had been worn for at least a day beyond social acceptability.

“She was not part of the arrangement.”

Kira didn’t miss the sneer of disapproval and eye roll the Asian threw at his three bodyguards. With Markus, she couldn’t tell if the button malfunction was a ploy to make them classify him as a harmless moron or a classic Markus moment. Just this once, she wished her cousin could be more like his twin, Kane, the ex-Army Ranger—a man who lived to be organized, efficient, and deadly. Too bad he hadn’t tagged along, but his international security job kept him out of the country a lot. She suspected the government still owned Kane, even if he wasn’t military anymore.

Goosebumps studded her arms as the winter Florida air brushed her skin. The bushes at the edge of the parking lot rustled. She scrutinized the shadows and tried to tune out the cacophony of music polluting the air from Jacksonville’s downtown. The attempt failed. The city was hopping at eleven on New Year’s Eve. Every restaurant sounded to be throwing a blowout. Stragglers roamed. Fifty yards away a couple chose that moment for an intimate lip suck. One staggered, the other laughed, and they strolled away whispering.

A light breeze shifted the ambient temperature down several degrees, blowing in the smell of approaching precipitation. A chill slithered down her spine. The temperature variant, however, had nothing to do with the reaction. Evil lurked nearby. Something far more dangerous than the four edgy Asians.

“Check them,” ordered the Asian. His hand shook as he smoothed his short, graying black hair.

Markus backed away from the hulking bodyguard headed his way. His gaze locked on the guy’s hypertrophied arms.

“No weapons. That was our agreement, not that you kept up your end.” Markus pointed at the bodyguard’s beltline where his jacket bulged. “I’m but the middleman here, Ryom. Where’s the trust?”

“Fuck trust. I’ve barely survived two assassination attempts over this thing. Why should I trust an American?” He waved his man toward Markus and another Kira’s way.

The guy assigned to frisk her leered at the cleavage line of her scoop-neck black sweater. Her stomach lurched.

She forced a demure smile and murmured, “Not like I can hide anything in this outfit.”

The guy smirked before he ran his hands down her top, copping an unnecessary feel of her chest. She forced herself to ignore her instinct to squirm. His hands smoothed along her practically pasted-on skinny jeans down to the tops of her black, leather boots. God, how she loved the boots. Slick, high heeled, black leather zips. Any idiot knew what came next. A trained operative would demand those boots off for a little look-see and that couldn’t happen.

As he came up from his crouch, the bodyguard stared deeply into her eyes, transfixed. Even with their almost twelve-inch height differential, the unique two-toned pale coloring of her irises mesmerized him, as expected. His eyes would remain glued to hers until she blinked.

She suggested, “You don’t need to worry about the boots. They’re too tight to hide anything.”

He nodded. Loudly he reported, “She’s clean, sir.”

Most of the time she sought to conceal her unusual abilities, but not tonight. They needed to get through this alive. In her book a little cheating was okay.

She watched Markus remove his loafers. His big toe protruded from a ginormous sock hole. She caught his gaze and cocked an eyebrow. His cheeks flushed as he shoved his foot back into the shoe.

“Let’s see it, Ryom.” Markus waved Kira close and drawled, “I want to be sure my buyer is getting his money’s worth.”

Ryom extracted a cloth-wrapped item from his inner coat pocket. Carefully, he exposed an Egyptian beaded collar. His gaze turned reverent, and he caressed the piece.

“Is it the real thing, Doc?” Markus asked.

“Could you turn it over, please?” Kira watched Ryom flip it.

Waves of mystic energy assaulted her. She backed up a step and eyed the collar. It exuded an ancient and seductive energy that was pure evil.

“Yes. It’s real. It looks like the Necherophes
wesekh
from the Cairo museum.” At least she thought it looked like the pictures Markus had shown her two hours ago of a decorated beaded collar owned by some pharaoh millennia ago. She wasn’t a professional archaeologist. Her skill was reading energies, not that Markus knew that. He believed her gifted at discerning an original artifact from a fake based on sight alone.

Shadowy, ominous energy closed in around them. It wasn’t from the
wesekh
. She recognized the distinctive icy darkness.